Morning Frost

   January 25, 2008 – In recent months I’ve taken a bit of drubbing from friends and others who know me. One asked when I would come to my senses and sell the farm. Another asked when I would stop rushing into burning buildings, a question that surprised me, as I have no sense of doing that. Others have told me to calm down, slow down, stop “flipping out,” do fewer things, stop adding new ones.
   I am doing a number of things. I write books. I take pictures.  I do hospice volunteer work with Izzy. I run the the farm, mostly with Annie and Rose.
   I have launched a new photo site. I am plotting a tiny, informal imprint, Bedlam Farm Books, to self-publish some classy stuff in small quantities. Next week I start teaching writing, part-time, in the Granville Public Schools. Ten students have been selected for my class, and I hope we will all write great stuff together, and, if it is good, maybe publish it. I post several times a day to this blog, which I have come to love, and exchange messages with some of you, which I also love. I tend to family and friends, as many of you do. I walk dogs, talk to steers, taunt goats.
    Am I driven? Pushing? Rushing into burning buildings? Rescuing things?
    Maybe. I might be quite mad, as has been suggested at various times of my life and seems, increasingly, to be true.
    And it seems I am posessed.
    I hope so.
    I am determined to live a good life, and the definition of that varies about as wildly as weather.
    What is a good life to me?
    Mythologist Joseph Campbell says the definition of a good life is one hero’s journey after another. You finish one, begin another, and then another, and then another.
    A good life, I think, begins where madness begins, where we are gripped by a calling, or more than one – hospice work, pictures, a life in nature, with animals, writing. A good life involves love, to family friends. And generousity. A good life involves zeal,  a call to purpose and work we care about, and strive to do well. A good life calls for sacrifice. You must often give up something to get something. A good life has pain and loss and great sorrow. A good life has joy and meaning. It requires staggering amounts of faith.
    A good life involves learning, change, growth. It often means foregoing security, stability, even some sanity. It involves zeal, some passion, and requires strength, even as it often evokes fear, fatigue, humiliation,  isolation. You keep going. Then you keep going some more.
    I care about what I do. I love my family and friends. I want to leave a mark. I have no illusions. I am no better than anybody else, not nearly as good as some I can think of. I am often wrong. I fail repeatedly, publicly, spectacularly. I do harm, tremble, stumble, and like everyone else, I will fall.
    But I love Campbell’s notion of a good life, I suppose, because it is the same as mine.
    There are many ways to live a good life. Glen, the logger-trucker Izzy and I saw die this week, led a good life. Glen loved  his work, his family, his friends, and was loyal and faithful to them to the last breath. He wanted simplicity, security, safety. He got that life. He told me he was never depressed in his life, not once.
    I lead a different kind of life, not that kind.
    Again and again, in my work, in my life, on this farm, I am called to something. I am struck by what Campbell calls the awakening of awe, the experience of mystery. I call upon my mind again and again to awaken in its own service.
     I believe a good life asks us to find and tell the truth about ourselves, to liberate that unseen presence buried far beneath. The colors of the world are manipulative, confusing, devious. They can be arranged in so artful a way that they can mislead or blind you, or they can show you the true light.
    Campbell says the writers and artists of the world are meant to put the objects and colors of the earth together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance and glow which is nothing less than the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when finally seen, reveal.
    That radiance then, is the point, the light that points the way to a good life, at least for me. I have not gotten there, and may never get there, but I am on the road and mean to keep trying, keep going.